A blog on the current crises in the Middle East and news accounts unpublished by the US press. Daily timeline of events in Iraq as collected from stories and dispatches in the French and Italian media: Le Monde (Paris), Il Corriere della Sera (Milan), La Repubblica (Rome), L'Orient-Le Jour (Beirut) and occasionally from El Mundo (Madrid).

Tuesday, December 06, 2005

Iraq, The Report Card

In the comments @ Atrios, Jade has prepared the Report Card on Iraq. (Personally, I think the aims Jade mentions are the politically correct and polished aims fed to the US public. The reality the aims were much darker...like along the lines of Operation Barbarossa, only genocide lite.)

Let's chart up Iraq: what were our objectives and have they been met? Why we went in.....

1. The Hope: To remove a despot.The Reality: We replaced one despot with another. One torturing regime with another. Which was something Powell learned about in Mogadishu, even called it The Powell Doctrine in Black Hawk Down. The idea that no matter who we think we're helping, they have a bad side too.Report Card: Failure

2. The Hope: Remove WMD (that we generally gave Saddam to fight Iran.)The Reality: Saddam had none! He was in UN compliance!Report Card: Failure.

3. The Hope: To install a Democracy beacon.The Reality: We installed a theocracy!Report Card: Failure

4. The Hope: Advance Human Rights.The Reality: To quote Bush's State of the Union token Iraqi lady, Women's rights have been set back 30 years. She won't be invited back this year!Report Card: Failure

5. The Hope: Military SuccessThe Reality: Iraq is on fire! We got our ass kicked. We hide in our little hidey holes like Saddam in his spidey hole. Any half wit can see that we are losing the fighting part of the war.Report Card: Abject Failure, with notation, "flippant".

6. The Hope: Spread Democracy! Let the Statue of Liberty's torchlight burn bright!The Reality: we have energized the opposition as never before, driving an impotent wooden stake into a hornets nest. We ever lost teh sympathy of the Iranian students!Report Card: Abject Failure.

7. The Hope: Make the US military shine again!The Reality: It's broken.Report Card: Failure.

8. The Hope: Establish the US as the clear leader for the new millenium.The Reality: Quite the opposite has occured. Losing the benefit of the doubt being the worst part probably.Report Card: Failure.

So, by all metrics, Iraq has been an umitigated disaster. What have we learned? That incompetence is consistent? As in, everything Bush tries to do, it ends up just the opposite of how he envisioned it.

If Bush were half honest he'd come to the next cabinet meeting and demand that we try our hardest to lose the damn war! Only then would he meet with success.

What we do not talk about yet is the psychological damage our nation has endured. Rummy wanted to rid us of the vestitges of our Vietnam guilt and sense of failure. A twent five year-old emotion. What's sad is that it's not the Statue of Liberty's beacon that burns bright in our minds. It's the spectre of war and failure and incompetence and dead babies and lost opportunities. In John Lennon's words, Just imagine what the world, the new millenium, might be like if we hadn't voted in the Worst President Ever. What if we'd had a true Republican, the original in fact, in office? Abe Lincoln makes GW Bush look like a Head Start reject, the Child Left Behind. And it was he who said Do I not destroy my enemy when I befriend them. Georgie Boy took the opposite tact, and we will all suffer for generations accordingly.

A Pre-Emptive PoemPosted 10-26-05Two days before the IndictmentFrom A Keats Ghost:

Much have I witnessed the Scandal of BushAnd many awful lies and outrages seen;Round many breaches have I beenWhich bards in fealty to Republic hold.Oft of one great Injury had I been toldThat worried the Founders in repose;Yet did I never see it so clearTill I heard Fitzgerald speak out loud and bold:Then I felt like some Justice on HighWhen a pure Truth comes into his view:Or like Honest Abe when with wise eyesHe saved the Union - and all his menLook'd at each other with great relief -Silent, upon a stillness at Appomattox

Now it is not good for the Christian’s health to hustle the Aryan brown, For the Christian riles, and the Aryan smiles and he weareth the Christian down; And the end of the fight is a tombstone white with the name of the late deceased, And the epitaph drear: “A Fool lies here who tried to hustle the East.”